Work Text:
At first it was just a rumour.
Rumours about Seongje were numerous and ridiculous to start with – what was another one to the list?
Geum Seongje killed his childhood dog (impossible to prove, though not implausible).
Geum Seongje locked his babysitter in a cupboard for three days (sounded far-fetched – surely someone would have noticed).
Geum Seongje put a teacher in a coma (could be true, he hit them often enough).
Geum Seongje was part of a gang (that one was definitely true).
Geum Seongje was really soft for some girl (completely impossible).
Just another stupid rumour, nothing to pay attention to.
Still, though.
It grew.
Details began emerging.
The girl was at Ganghak. Seongje had been into her since middle school. The girl couldn’t speak. The girl was half foreign, with dark skin and big curly hair.
That last bit was the bit that piqued Baku’s interest: if you were going to invent a girl, why would you make her such an obvious anti-hero? Surely you’d make up someone who looked like everyone’s dream girl. An actress, or singer. Someone who looked and sounded like IU or Jennie. You wouldn’t go through the trouble of inventing a mute half-foreigner with frizzy hair.
“She’s called Rosé,” Choi Hyoman told them one day, after overhearing them talking about it in the lunch queue. They all ignored Hyoman – he still insisted on pretending they were mates, frequently trying to insert himself in their conversations. They’d given up on plainly telling him to fuck off.
“See,” Gotak said, “told you it was made up. Bet you some other idiot is gonna tell us she’s called Jennie.”
“If she’s half foreign then she’s likely to have a foreign name,” Baku replied. “She’d hardly be the only half-Korean around.”
“Still sounds made up,” Gotak insisted. “Right, Juntae?”
Juntae shrugged, glancing nervously at Sieun before replying:
“W-well, there is a black girl who speaks perfect Korean that goes to Ganghak… She’s called Rosie, I think, or Rose… lives in my building, I see her at the shop sometimes and I’ve seen her in her uniform… her dad’s Korean.”
“Yeah, well,” Gotak raised a finger to Baku’s face, trying to stop the shit eating grin from spreading any further, “still doesn’t mean Geum Seongje is into her, or that he’s ‘soft’ or whatever the fuck…”
“No, that’s true as well,” Choi Hyoman turned to them again, irritant and persistent as athlete’s foot. “My mate goes there, he said even the teachers know it, they always put them together in class because Seongje totally behaves if she’s there.”
“Bullshit,” Gotak forwent their rule of not addressing Hyoman directly.
“No, no, it’s true,” Hyoman doubled down. “Everybody knows it. He’s been whipped for her since middle school. Blushes and shit.”
“Bullshit!” Gotak exclaimed again.
And indeed, it must have been bullshit.
Geum Seongje, the ruthless psychopath? The guy who sought pain? Laughed when you hit him? Laughed when he hit you? The top dog of Ganghak High, rumoured to be the newly appointed leader of the Union? Soft for some girl?
There was absolutely no way.
…
Was there?
“Are you guys thinking what I’m thinking?” Hyoman grinned at them above his tray of rice.
“Why are you sitting with us?” Sieun mumbled, barely moving his lips.
“Should we find out who this girl is, and go and ask her to tell Seongje to back off?”
This is the bit where you will, eventually, need to give people some context as you recall this story: Na Baekjin from Yeoil High had been the leader of some sort of multi school delinquent alliance called Union, with ties to real life, grown up criminal networks. Baekjin had died under extremely suspicious circumstances (a suicide, except he’d shot himself in the head twice), and rumour now had it that Geum Seongje, who had been Baekjin’s right hand man, had taken over as leader. This was relevant to this group because they were Eunjang students, and Eunjang had always resisted assimilation by Union. With Seongje taking over from Baekjin, it wasn’t that far of a leap to assume that he would be trying to achieve what his predecessor had failed to do. There certainly appeared to be more and more hits from Ganghak boys and associates onto Eunjang students. Everyone was talking about it, everyone was trying to work out a way to get Seongje to back off.
The idea that there was a person out there who had any sort of power over Geum Seongje was a wild and intoxicating one.
And… yeah. That was what they were thinking. If it had been true.
But it was not true.
Because there was no way.
There was way.
They hung around the shop at the bottom of Juntae’s block for a few hours, and sure enough, a girl in a Ganghak uniform, with Afro hair, and a Korean dad, came in at some point. Feeling somewhat creepy, they followed the pair around, listening in on their conversation (what they were having for dinner and would be watching on TV, all in fluent Korean). The dad even referred to the girl as ‘Rosie’, so that confirmed it all so far.
“Well, she obviously can talk,” Gotak mumbled, as they watched father and daughter disappearing inside the apartment block, “so that bit was bullshit.”
“You said she spoke perfect Korean, but I’m hearing a charming little lilt,” Baku grinned.
“She’s really pretty,” Juntae said hesitantly. “I see her every day, she’s really pretty.”
“Oy, oy,” Baku exclaimed, slapping Juntae on the back so enthusiastically that the other boy’s glasses slid right off to the end of his nose.
“N-not, not like that,” Juntae hurriedly said, pushing his glasses back in place, “she’s not my type, I just… I can see she’s pretty, and if Geum Seongje liked her, I would get why.”
“Come on now, Juntae-yah,” Baku placed an arm across Juntae’s shoulders and began dragging him away from the girl’s building, Gotak following closely. “Tell us everything you know about this girl.”
The girl was you – of course it was.
And this was what Juntae knew about you at that point in time:
Your mother was black, and her Korean was good, though not as good as yours. Your mother wore her hair big and her clothes colourful, and she’d once cornered Juntae’s mum outside the shop and talked to her for ages. Your father was Korean, strong, probably a career soldier or something, and he went jogging every day. You also jogged, though not every day. You also did some sort of combat sport, which Juntae had gathered from the fact that you returned home late every Thursday in sportswear with a pair of boxing gloves dangling from your arm. You liked to listen to music loud at home, sometimes so loud Juntae felt his walls shake from the bass. It was often joyful, bouncy, rhythmical music, probably something from wherever your mother was from. He wasn’t spying on you, he really wasn’t, but once he’d been walking past your corridor when your dad had opened the door and he’d caught a glimpse of your mother and you dancing in the kitchen. Sometimes it was rock-pop stuff, and occasionally it was k-pop. BTS, mainly. A lot of music came from your end of the corridor, and Juntae knew for a fact that neighbours had spoken to your parents about it before.
Juntae also knew you listened to music whenever you left the house, because he left the building just after you did in the morning and he could see your headphones firmly placed on your head as you walked ahead of him. You pet cats, looked at birds, rescued snails from the middle of the pavement. You parted ways, unbeknownst to you, a little before the underpass, where you turned towards the direction of Ganghak and Juntae continued on towards Eunjang.
“Juntae-yah, you sneaky little creep,” Baku’s grin was wolfish, “you sure she isn’t your type? You’ve been watching her very closely.”
Juntae shook his head, and unbeknownst to him and Baku, Gotak and Sieun exchanged a quick side-glance. Baku still had not caught on that Juntae was not into girls.
“Ok, so, the girl is real,” Gotak conceded one afternoon, as the four Eunjang boys lazed around the basketball court, not quite passing the ball to each other intently enough to call it playing. “Doesn’t mean shit about Seongje.”
“No it’s true,” Choi Hyoman reappeared, like a huge spider you glanced once then lost, eventually choosing to believe it must have moved out, only to suddenly have it running along the edge of your sofa. “My mate tells me about it all the time. Seongje is fucking whipped for her. It’s obvious as fuck.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit, Gotak-ah,” Hyoman cosied up to them, coming to stand right between them and catching the ball. “My mate doesn’t lie.”
“If this was true, which it isn’t, then why the hell wouldn’t anyone have gone after that girl to get to Seongje?”
“Gotak-ah,” Hyoman shook his head and tutted, dribbling the ball a little, “come on, my dude, think about it. Would you willingly try and mess with something if you knew it would make Geum Seongje want to skin you alive?”
“And no one who calls himself a man would go and hurt a girl,” Baku declared.
“Yes,” Hyoman nodded, “that, too, I guess. Of course.” He chuckled. “Not that anyone could. He fucking guards her like, like… like a dog, or whatever. No boys ever try to talk to her, they can’t, you can’t even look in her direction without Seongje breathing down your neck… I don’t get it,” he added to himself, “personally. She’s alright, but she’s no IU.”
“What about outside of school?” Sieun asks, uncharacteristically involved in the conversation. “Does Geum Seongje follow her outside of school, too?”
Hyoman pondered this. He shrugged; as far as he knew, no, Geum Seongje did not follow the girl around after school.
This was how you came to know Seo Juntae.
It should probably be said that you didn’t have many friends – you had joined sometime during middle school, moving in from abroad, looking foreign as anything, sounding a bit off with the Korean, unable to read it. Your hair had been curly and huge and, whilst no one had been outwardly racist to you, there had been plenty of comments about the hair, the skin, the accent, and not all of them were kind. As a bit of a defence mechanism, you had kind of closed off, wearing headphones most of the time, focusing hard on learning written Korean and making your accent disappear as much as possible. You’d tamed the hair, too, wrestling it into tight buns or letting your mum braid it when you were feeling a little rebellious. You probably came off as either extremely shy or a little intimidating, perhaps both, and so you did not really get approached much. The other girls were friendly enough to you, but none ever tried to sit with you, or to invite you to have lunch with them. You were always picked last for teams during PE, even though you were faster than all the girls, and most of the boys. You liked to think you had hardened yourself against the casual rejection, that it did not bother you, and certainly not as much as ten-year old you, running home crying to your parents because no one had wanted to sit with you on the bus.
So the girls gave you a wide berth, most of the time, and so did the boys, for obvious reasons.
You had noticed too – it would have been impossible not to. You had no idea why it was this way, when and how it had started, where it was headed.
Geum Seongje liked you.
As in, probably fancied you.
Either that, or he had a phobia of Black people.
He’d used to be a skinny, bespectacled boy in middle school. Somehow, he had risen through the ranks over the years, quickly becoming some sort of thug. These days, at eighteen or nineteen, towering over the others at an intimidating 1.85 metres tall, having gained a reputation for being near impossible to beat in a fight, Geum Seongje was the absolute top dog.
He was violent, unhinged, immune to pain.
He squared up to teachers, dangled boys from windows, marched off to war after school with a bunch of wannabes following after him. Showed up the next day looking like a mummy, face covered in bandages, knuckles bloody, malevolent and satisfied grin in place, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He’d once showed with a mighty limp and a cast around his foot, rumour having it that he’d been stabbed. Still somehow managed to look both exhilarated and arrogant about it.
His loose compliance with school uniform regulation and even looser understanding of punctuality, both of which went completely unchallenged by the staff, were testament to how scary of a dude he was. The teachers left him well enough alone, turning a blind eye to his every transgression. Once, you had seen him slap a kid, then spill a hot ramyeon over his legs, all in front of the maths teacher Mr Park, who had just stood there pretending not to see it. It just wasn’t worth it.
As if the dude wasn’t psychotic and terrifying enough, he’d once come up with some bullshit three second rule: if you looked him in the eyes for over three seconds, he beat you up.
He didn’t hit girls, but he did shove them out of the way if they ever did try to have a go at him (or at you). Not that anyone would, but that one girl had done so once, when he’d beat up her boyfriend, and Seongje had just stood there grinning as she yelled. She had slapped him maybe three times before he had suddenly shoved her to the side, sending her flying bum first into a chair. Then, he’d walked off. That girl’s brother had had his hand broken in retaliation.
So yeah, Geum Seongje was horrid.
Except – not to you.
With you, he was quiet. Discreet. He moved out of your way. Let you go first in the queue for the cafeteria. Didn’t look at you, not straight on. Never spoke to you, either, yet he stood between you and whatever was going on. If there was a fight, Seongje appeared, standing between you and the commotion. If the fire alarm went off, he somehow found his way to you, walked close by until you reached the assembly point. It was both unnerving and baffling, especially since he never did speak to you nor look directly at you. You could almost kid yourself into thinking this was all in your imagination, if not for the more outward incidences of support. There were many of varying degrees, but a few stood out to you above the rest.
You’d once had to give a presentation in class, freshman year, and in your anxiety you had mispronounced a word, accidentally turning it into something rude. Your face had burst into flame, the teacher eagerly correcting you, the class erupting into giggles. One boy in particular had laughed like a dying hyena, the sound jarring and obnoxious, but then Seongje, who had been sitting silently at the back of the class, threw his history book at the dying hyena’s head and yelled at him to shut the fuck up. The whole class fell silent, even the teacher, who’d stared at Seongje in utter shock, needing a full twenty or so seconds before he had recovered enough to ask you to carry on. The rest of your presentation had gone on in utter, respectful silence, and some had even clapped a little at the end. The teacher amongst them.
Another time, in English class, you had been working quietly at your desk, listening intently to the teacher. She was new, young, meek. None of the other kids respected her authority and your heart absolutely broke for her. Her name was Ms Lee, and she kept tripping over her words, getting confused, trying valiantly to continue her lesson, hands shaking as she dragged the chalk along the board, whilst the room was a sea of snickers, yawns, and whatever the hell Seongje was doing at the back with his brown nosers.
“And so the past participle… can I have a bit of quiet, please? Settle down!”
Very, very bold of Ms Lee to address Seongje’s corner directly. The whole class sucked in a breath.
“Are you talking to me?” Seongje asked, snickering. Behind you, you could hear his little clique cackling like gulls. Rage simmered under your skin, you were pretty sure your temperature had risen along with it.
“Yes, you. Geum Seongje-yah. Be quiet, and sit properly.”
If only Ms Lee’s voice wasn’t so shrill. If only she wasn’t so young. If only she’d picked a different school to teach at. You heard the desk clunking as Seongje’s feet landed on top of it.
“What are you gonna do about it?” Seongje taunted, menacing. A wave of ‘ooooh’s’ rippled along the back of the room.
Something in you snapped a little. Your hair, in braids, at that time, whipped over your shoulder as you turned sharply in your seat to look right at Geum Seongje and his little gang.
“Stop it,” you snapped, glaring, “the teacher’s talking.”
The room temperature dropped by at least four degrees as your blow landed. This was the first time you had looked at Seongje directly, and you saw the way his eyes widened slightly at your sudden attention. The other kids were all sporting owlish looks. You briefly wondered whether this was the first time any of them had ever heard your voice that academic year. Probably was. You strongly suspected many of them didn’t even know you spoke Korean. Geum Seongje and you looked at each other, across the room. You distantly counted to three in your mind. Turned away after two.
Behind you, the desk creaked as Seongje removed his feet.
You thought you would be dead by the next evening. At school, the rest of the day, everyone stared at you, everyone stayed even further away from you than usual. You pretended not to notice. Left school as soon as you were able to. Once the anger and adrenaline of the moment had passed, you’d sniffed the whole way home, burst into tears as soon as you’d reached the safety of your bedroom. He would kill you. Geum Seongje was going to kill you. You were dead. You were a corpse walking to the chopping block.
Needless to say, you didn’t die.
You called in sick for a couple of days, but eventually had to return to school, where people still kind of stared at you and whispered. Geum Seongje was his usual self: violent to everyone, soft with you. He stepped out of your way in the corridor. Made you cut in front of him in the cafeteria. And, stunningly, he behaved in class. The word spread – it spread amongst teachers too. Soon enough, you were seated next to Seongje in every class the two of you shared. Tense, nervous, you sat there stiffly, keeping well to your side of the desk, making sure not to look at him or take any space at all. And, amazingly, so did he. If you dropped your pen, he dived to get it for you. If you struggled with a maths problem, he angled his notebook just so, letting you catch sight of his work. Geum Seongje was good at maths – that did come as a monumental surprise. With all the fighting, and the complete disrespect for school, you had assumed he was thick. You had been wrong.
You once risked a glance up at the side of his face, whispered a quick ‘thank you’. He then ripped a page out of his notebook and spent the rest of the class folding it this way and that, just out of the corner of your eye, and when the bell rang he left quickly, dropping something on your side of the desk: a paper rose.
You blushed so hard it probably showed.
There were a great many things that pointed pretty clearly towards the fact that Geum Seongje liked liked you.
If you were sweating and out of breath in PE, he handed you a water bottle. Without talking to you, without looking at you, but still. He stood there with his hand outstretched until you took the bottle.
That time you dropped an earphone in a puddle, just outside school, you swore under your breath and picked it up. You looked up to see Seongje looking at you from across the street. A new pair or earphones appeared in your desk the next day, and you just knew they were from him. Despite your best efforts to place them back in his desk, they kept reappearing in yours, until you had no choice but to accept them. Still, he didn’t look at you or talk to you.
This was all nothing though compared to the thing that happened to you just a month ago, at the very start of senior year: you got your period, three days early.
You became aware of it halfway through the morning, rushed out of class with your bag as soon as you were able to. In the toilets you were able to assess the damage: luckily, you had a pad. You hadn’t got to the toilets early enough, though, and there was a definite stain on the back of your skirt. It wasn’t so huge that everyone would notice, but it was there, and would be seen by anyone standing behind you… like in the cafeteria, for example.
You’d left your blazer at home, like an idiot. It was warm still and you had not anticipated that you may end up needing it to hide your bloody arse.
How mortifying.
You thought of your PE kit, back in class: could it have a hoodie in it? Or had you taken it home to wash?
You thought of your classmates: which were you closest to? Would any of the girls lend you a jacket? Would they think it was too gross?
You thought of your phone, safely locked away: should you go and knock on the teachers’ door, ask to text your parents for a change of clothes? Should you feign illness, and go home? Your damn shirt was too short to cover anything, even untucked… The colour of the uniform was forgiving, but the blood was still significantly darker…
The bell rang as you were contorting yourself in front of the mirror, trying once more to assess just how bad it was. Should you just skip lunch, today? Sit in your chair until home time, then run the fuck home?
Shit.
You walked quickly back to class, hands clasped behind your back, probably obvious as fuck. You slid into your chair, smoothing your skirt under you, picking up your pen.
Perhaps you were giving off a weird energy, because Seongje did look at you then, you could feel his eyes on the side of your face. You bit your lip, facing decidedly forward, flicking your pen.
You had decided to stay put until home time when the teacher directly questioned why you were still sitting there instead of going for lunch. Seongje was still in his seat too, which was odd, as he was usually out of the door before the bell even went. You tried saying you had work to finish, but the teacher was not having that, and he then waved off your protests about not being hungry. Resigned, you stood up, quickly bringing your hands behind you and hoping Seongje’s eyes were back to avoiding you.
They probably hadn’t been, because you’d not made it three steps down the corridor that suddenly there was a pair of arms appearing around your middle.
He did not touch you – his hands never made contact. They moved quickly in front of you, his breath warm against your neck, and in an instant he was gone and rushing ahead of you down the corridor. Looking down, you saw why: his jacket was now tied around your waist, effectively shielding the back of your skirt from view.
If people noticed that you were wearing Geum Seongje’s jacket (which they did, because they did not half stare at it), no one said anything to you.
There was absolutely no way a boy would just do that for a girl he did not like, you were sure of it. Any lingering doubts you may have had about how Seongje felt about you were wiped out by this incident. There was also absolutely no way that Geum Seongje wasn't, deep down, a little good too.
You washed the jacket and returned it, along with a boxful of chocolate chip cookies you had made. Geum Seongje blushed, first at the tip of his ears and then over his cheeks. It struck something in your heart, deeper even than his incredibly kind gesture with the jacket had done. You knew he was a bad guy, but by God he was good to you, had been good to you, continued to be good to you.
You stopped being scared of him. Sometimes, if you made eye contact with him, you even gave him a little smile or wave. He always blushed and looked away, running a hand through his hair, sometimes kind of giving a half aborted wave back in your general direction whilst staring down at his shoes. It was… kind of endearing. Or it could have been, if he hadn’t still been appearing with bruised knuckles every so often, and the occasional bandage on his face.
Rumours that the two of you were dating began popping around, and with it came an unwelcome wave of interest.
That was when Juntae came in.
You met Juntae at the shop by your place. He approached you first, speaking to you in Korean, timidly asking if you knew where he might find the seaweed sheets. It was a very clear excuse to talk to you, you knew this boy frequented this shop as often as you did. It became even clearer when, once you’d pointed him in the direction of said seaweed, he began asking about the drink you were buying and whether it was better than the one he’d got. You had felt yourself becoming more and more closed off, answers short and vague, until he’d shyly said:
“Sorry for all the questions, I’m trying to cook a meal for my boyfriend and I’m second guessing everything. Always smells nice on your end of the corridor, I thought I’d pick your brains.”
And just like that, you opened up to him. Became warm and helpful, perhaps even flattered to be trusted with this information. Perhaps you were too trusting, despite all the years of distance you had put between yourself and others. Maybe because of all the years of distance that you had put between yourself and others. The two of you chatted about food for a little while, then exchanged numbers. Juntae lived on the floor above yours, and you remembered seeing him around, now that he’d mentioned it.
The texts evolved over time, eventually becoming more general, and in less than a month it looked like you had made a friend. You began walking part of the way to and back from school together. It was nice, having a friend. He talked about his boyfriend a lot, a Taekwondo athlete, and lamented his own weak physique and lack of stamina. You told him about your kickboxing lessons, he sounded interested. Showed up the next week. He was weak, not a violent bone in his body, and you really believed him to be your friend. Over time, he timidly asked if you had a boyfriend, and you found yourself telling him a little about that boy at school who wasn’t your boyfriend, but behaved like maybe he wanted to be. Juntae asked if you liked the boy, and you thought of Seongje’s bruised knuckles, resting near your hand on the desk. You thought of all the black and blue faces of other boys around you. You thought of the teachers, shaking at the front of the room. You thought of the paper rose, the earphones, the jacket. The gentle and protective presence that shadowed you around school. You told Juntae that you didn’t know. Maybe.
It was Juntae who encouraged you to try and talk to the maybe boy, figure out how you felt, if the good outweighed the bad. It had seemed sound advice at the time, and, mostly, it had seemed genuine (you really were too trusting, lonelier than you’d thought).
You placed your bag on the floor as you took your seat, sometime during the spring term. Seongje was already seated next to you, staring out of the window with his hands in his pockets.
“Hey,” you said. Nothing. “Uh… Seongje?”
This was the first time you had ever said his name out loud; his shoulders tensed, he turned to you, eyebrows high, disbelieving. You studied his face.
Slim, with dark eyes behind half rimmed glasses. A wild mop of hair. He was rather handsome, objectively speaking.
“Sorry,” you smiled, feeling yourself flush a little. “Sorry to bother you, just… I was wondering if you might help me with this problem,” you said as you broke eye contact at the three seconds mark, retrieving your exercise book from your bag.
After a short, baffled pause, he joined you leaning over your book, peering down at the problem. A braid slid off your shoulder and landed on his hand. You watched the muscles tense and flex, whispered an apology as you quickly moved your hair. A glance up confirmed he was blushing.
He made quick work of the maths problem, explaining it to you in short sentences, voice incredibly quiet, like he was afraid to be too loud. You nodded, looked at him again to smile your thanks. He blushed harder, looked away from you before the three seconds had passed.
“You’re really good at this,” you heard yourself compliment, “how come you don’t just do the work?”
“I do the tests,” Seongje replied, shifting in his seat, hands going to rest on his lap, then back on the desk, then running through his hair, then back in his lap then on the desk. He was nervous. He was nervous because you were speaking to him. “For the grades. The rest is boring.”
“Boring?” He nodded to his hands. You understood, all of a sudden. “Because it’s too easy for you?” He nodded again, a hand running through his hair. “You like a challenge,” you added, not really asking, just voicing your deduction aloud. He didn’t nod, but he didn’t need to. “Feels challenging enough to me,” you laughed self depreciatingly, “I must seem really dumb to you.”
“No,” he said quickly, adamantly, so genuinely it did go straight inside your chest and curl around your heart.
You stared, caught off guard by his candour, watching as he widened his eyes at his hands on the desk, clearly also caught off guard by his own response. A nervous bubble of laughter rose up your throat, escaped with a breath.
“Well, if you do want a challenge, I can tell you what’s really hard to learn,” he looked at you, open, curious. One, two, “French,” you said, breaking eye contact briefly before returning to it, “French is really complicated.” One, two.
You broke eye contact again, stared down at the maths on your notebook.
“Do you speak French?” Seongje asked, so low you only heard him because your every senses were focused on him.
“I’m from Haiti,” you heard yourself say, “well, my mum is. We speak Creole, but you still have to learn French at school and all… Haiti was a colony,” you added, probably uselessly, since you now remembered this guy scored the highest on the history and geography tests too. At the time you had assumed he’d cheated, but after seeing his mental math skills, you were beginning to realise he was actually genuinely very very smart. “So you still have to learn proper French, even if we all speak Creole at home, even though none of us were ever going to go to France… my mum still insists I keep my French up to shape, for some reason. I think she thinks it matters even more than Korean. Talk about internalised colonialism. Anyway.”
This was it, you thought. You had finally managed to bore him out of his weird infatuation. The spell, for want of a better word, had been broken. He now saw you for who you really were: some weird girl who had caught his eye only because she looked different. How disappointed must he be to realise you were just like any other boring person in his orbit, complaining about their mums.
“Can you teach me?”
“Pardon?”
“Can you teach me?” Seongje repeated, looking at you.
He was tall, even sat down – you tried not to let yourself shrink into your chair. One, two…
“Teach you French?”
“Yeah?”
Why?
You didn’t ask – you didn’t need to. He was bored, he liked challenges. You had just told him French was a challenge. He wanted to give it a go. You understood.
“Sure,” you said, smiling. His eyes tracked the way your cheeks and lips moved to accommodate the smile. “I can’t guarantee I’ll be a great teacher, but I’ll try my best.”
I owe you as much, you felt like adding. For the jacket, mainly, but also for everything else.
This was how you ended up tutoring the school’s worst boy in French. You taught him before school, during break, at lunch, sometimes after school, whenever he wasn’t busy doing something else (fighting). He picked up the basics quickly, you had to admit, and his pronunciation was decent (there was something about the way hearing him speak French made you feel, but it was too soon to really try and understanding why that was). You began introducing grammar, and that was when you saw him come to understand what you had meant by challenge. Still, though, he was interested and eager. You gave him quizzes, scribbled out onto a torn page of your book, and he completed them. You graded them, as a joke, and he turned them into paper roses. By then, you had a collection of those at home. Your mum noticed, but she didn’t comment. You showed one to Juntae, who looked surprised at first, then genuinely impressed.
By then, the rumour that you two were dating was so strong it had become local lore. You wondered whether Seongje knew about it, if he intentionally chose not to correct people (you weren’t correcting anyone either). One day, you decided to ask.
“So, um… does it bother you? You know, that uh… people are saying things? About us?”
“What are they saying?” Seongje was frowning down at the grammar multi-choice answer problem you had posed him that morning before homeroom.
“That we’re, like… I mean, we both know we’re not, so it doesn’t matter. You’re right.”
“Huh?” he looked up, directing that frown at you. You were deeply regretting bringing up the topic. Why had you brought up the topic?
“Like, I mean, obviously, we’re kind of friends now, right? Even if we don’t meet outside of here. Like, it’d be ok if we did, you know?”
He didn’t know, if the look on his face was anything to go by. Utter bafflement and confusion, his eyes darting between yours, eyebrows furrowed. Well, this had gone terribly. You should have planned it better. One, two, three…
“I just need – ,” you broke eye contact, jumped to your feet, “I just have to, uh…” you left before finishing that sentence, rushing out of the classroom and walking down the corridor with no clear goal in mind.
What was wrong with you? What even had you been trying to achieve? Were you trying to ask him out? Were you fishing for him to ask you out? Just how stupid had you sounded, just then?
Fast steps echoed in the corridor as someone rushed in from behind you. Seongje appeared in front of you, a hand raised.
“Hey,” he said, catching his breath, “wait.”
You waited.
Seongje stood there, shifting on his feet, hands on his hips, tongue running along the inside of his mouth, eyes wide as he considered you, chest still rising and falling fast.
“You, uh…” he started, then ran a hand through his hair. “You…” the words were difficult to find, you suspected he had never said them before, just had a basic understanding of how these things went. “Do you want to eat? Out? With… me?” He watched your face closely, watched you open your mouth to respond, rushed to add: “I owe you for all the French lessons, right? I could buy you a meal? Whatever you want.”
“Yeah,” you breathed out, blushing so hard it probably showed, which it did not often do, thanks to your complexion. “Yeah, I’d… I’d like that. I’d like to eat out with you,” you clarified. “You don’t owe me or anything… But yeah, let’s eat out.”
“Ok,” he said, releasing a breath, laughing, almost, smile so wide it revealed gums. “Ok, ok. Uh… this weekend?”
“Yeah,” you repeated, nodding dumbly, feeling like the infatuated eighteen-year-old that you were. You did look at each other, then, properly. For the full three seconds, smiling. It was hard to reconcile this boy with what you knew of Geum Seongje and it sure was easy to overlook it.
When you told Juntae, he seemed happy for you, yet weirdly bittersweet about it too. You thought maybe he was having problems with his boyfriend. You didn’t pry.
That Saturday you agonised over what to wear, settling in the end for something comfortable and not too date-like. Seongje had never seen you in anything other than your school uniform or PE kit. You put a little bit of make up on and told your parents you were meeting Juntae – yes, your gay friend Juntae from upstairs. They liked Juntae.
You met Seongje partway to the town centre, spotting him easily in the crowd. He cut a striking figure, with his height, hair, glasses, orange windbreaker. He spotted you quickly too – you supposed you did always stand out no matter what you did.
You had agreed to meet for lunch, which you had, a little awkwardly at first seeing as Seongje barely spoke to you or looked at you and the whole conversation effort fell onto you. You gave up after a little while, choosing to test out the silence, see if it was uncomfortable. Seongje then became significantly more nervous, throwing furtive glances at you and cracking his knuckles repeatedly. You were, once again, endeared.
“We were in the same middle school, right?” you asked, taking pity on him. “Do you remember me?” You shook your head. “You probably do, I had a terrible afro back then.”
“I remember you,” Seongje replied. “I liked your hair.”
Your eyebrows rose, you looked at him. One, two,…
“You did?”
“Yeah. And your eyes.”
…three. You looked away, once again feeling the now familiar wave of warmth creeping up your cheeks.
“We spoke, once,” Seongje said.
“Did we?”
Would he be offended that you didn’t remember?
“I was some skinny four-eyed, I’m not surprised you forgot about it. I picked up your pen, you said thank you, asked me my name. I told you my name and you said it was really poetic.”
“Song jay…” you remembered, now. You also remembered what you’d said next, back then, before you understood that it was in your best interest not to talk too much. “Ah yes, then I said that my name was Rose, and the two of us together were like spring,” you laugh, covering your face. “So silly.”
“I liked it,” Seongje repeated, smiling wide, “the rose and the song jay. Spring. I was eleven, and the prettiest girl ever said that to me. It blew my mind.”
Your hands felt cool on your cheeks as you hid your face, giggling. Seongje just watched you be embarrassed, smiling fondly.
You were beginning to understand that he wasn’t really shy, just nervous around you, careful not to scare you, second guessing himself. Once he relaxed, he was actually quite confident, self-assured and forward. He didn’t lie, he always said exactly what he meant. He wasn’t forceful with his interest in you, never overtly checking you out, though you could feel his eyes on your regardless (he liked it when you applied lipsil, you even suspected he liked it a little much, discreetly rearranging himself whenever that happened). However, if you asked, he was very honest about it.
You finished your meal, he paid, and afterwards he nonchalantly asked if you had plans for the afternoon. You said you didn’t.
You walked around a mall for while, chatting occasionally, looking at things you weren’t going to buy. You found yourself talking too much, about music, about jogging, about boxing, about Haiti. You asked him questions about his own interests too. He liked talking about music and video games, he could in fact geek out about graphics and mapping and coding and other things you had no idea about. You worked out that he had a mother who had remarried, and that he lived alone, more or less emancipated. He had a nice voice, raspy and low. Hours passed, which felt like minutes.
“I don’t want to go home yet,” you admitted sometime in the evening, sighing. It was getting a bit late, though, you didn’t want to be walking home in the middle of the night.
“We could stay out longer,” Seongje suggested, “go to the arcade?” Then, as if he was reading your mind: “I can walk you home after.” You hesitated. “You’re safe with me, I reckon I'm the most dangerous one out here.”
And the thing was… you knew you were, and you knew he was.
This was how you found yourself sitting with Seongje as he played a game. You’d tried a few other things first, pool, table football. He let you win every time, which was both infuriating and sweet. Then you naturally moved to the consoles.
You didn’t know how to play and were quite happy to watch. He selected some sort of battle game, then moved on to a horror concept, where you had to hide and sneak around an abandoned asylum, evading capture by inmates.
Seongje, it turned out, did a little streaming on the side. He asked if he could stream his game, you said ok, he told you where to sit if you didn’t want to be on camera. You chose to stay with him. At first, there were about fifty or so people watching. The comments began coming in.
Hey is that a girl?
Geum Seongje is with a girl
Is that Manon from Katseye?
Is that a foreigner?
Is that his girlfriend?
Money was coming in, too, sums a little too high and frequent given the low number of followers. You wondered if there was something illicit about this, decided not to let yourself consider this too closely. You looked away from the comments and focused on the screen.
The jumpscares got you every time, knocking nervous laughter out of you. You hid behind Seongje’s shoulder, gripped his arm, leaned over him to point at the screen whenever there was a puzzle to solve. He laughed, not unkindly, whenever you shrieked.
“You never jump,” you observed, “you never even flinch!”
You exchanged a look, you leaning back a little when you realised how close your faces were. He could probably have felt the press of your breast against his arm, as you’d jumped into him at the latest jumpscare. His ears were certainly a little red, eye contact a little shaky. You couldn’t help it, you glanced at the comments again, saw that the number of people watching had quadrupled.
damn she’s fine
can’t believe Geum Seongje is going to get laid before I do
Boy got rizz, he scored a foreigner
They look like they’re gonna kiss
You looked away.
“Because it’s predictable,” he told you, “I play these games a lot.”
He began to warn you: we’re due a jumpscare, it’s been five minutes. There’s a doorway, something will appear. We’re crawling, this means something will either crawl at us or behind us.
“Wow, that’s amazing,” you said, as Seongje once again predicted what would happen next.
He began to make you laugh: he’d offer commentary, during the gameplay, casually talking to screaming ghosts, pretending to be a carer to the inmates. You laughed a lot. You forgot all about the comments. Who knew Geum Seongje was fucking hilarious?
Afterwards he walked you home, and you held onto his arm, chatting excitedly about the game. You knew you were smitten, there was no going back. You exchanged phone numbers. He began messaging you – usually memes he’d found funny. You were the first to send a selfie, he gave it a heart. You later found out it was his new screensaver.
So the two of you did this for a while: chatting in class, learning French. Meeting up at the weekend to eat, walk around, play games. He bought you new running trainers, the same as his, with some of the money he’d received streaming, which was extremely boyfriend coded. You hadn’t kissed yet, but you certainly thought about it a lot.
You confided in Juntae, your best friend. He was very positive and supportive, encouraging you to listen to your heart and not the rumours around Seongje.
You weren’t officially dating Seongje, but it sure felt and looked as if you were. You just hadn’t had that talk yet.
It happened one weekend: you had left Seongje at the pool table to nip to the toilets. You were washing your hands when four girls suddenly entered the bathroom. All four were staring at you.
“You think you’re hot shit because you’re fucking Geum Seongje?”
You fought as hard as you could but in the end they did manage to pin you down, on the cold floor, and then a pair of scissors appeared. You screamed.
They had cut about two braids near the front of your head when the door burst open and Seongje walked in. It went deadly quiet. Seongje took the scene in: you, on the floor, eyes wet. Your hair, cut off. Four girls kneeling over you. You wondered if you were about to see him hurt girls.
“Seongje-yah,” the girl that had your legs pinned down started, “it’s not like that…”
It was like that. Any idiot could have seen that it was like that.
The girl didn’t get chance to scream as she was shoved into a cubicle, gurgling rising as her head was shoved in the toilet bowl.
Two girls headed for the door and Seongje caught them, giving them the same treatment. The last girl, scissors girl, stood and backed up to the mirrors. Seongje advanced upon her, silent, outwardly calm, though rage was rolling off of him in waves. His fist hit the mirror right next to scissors girl’s head, shattering like silver rain.
Seongje said he would kill the girls if they ever did so much as look in your direction, and you all believed him.
He put his jacket around your shoulders, you hid your face into his side as he walked you home. You hurried to your room, avoiding your parents, cried yourself to sleep.
In the morning you woke to several texts from him, most of them pictures of paper roses, some of them menus from new places, a couple were pictures of you, taken candidly at the arcade, and you looked pretty and happy in all of them. There was one line, sent at about three in the morning:
You’re still the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.
You assessed the damage: you now had half a fringe, curling up on your forehead. Impulsive, angry, you cut braids on the other side, giving yourself a full fringe. Then, you undid your braids, one by one. You were done. Done. They didn’t like your hair? Well, too bad. From now on, you would wear it loose, curly, big. If they didn’t like it, they could take it up with Geum Seongje.
Your parents liked your new hair. So did Juntae, on the way to school. In fact, most people liked it, even people who hadn’t spoken to you before. Perhaps you had been too quick to assume that bullies represented the majority.
As for Seongje… he loved it.
He watched you come in, staring openly. His ears went bright red, and he didn’t speak to you all morning. By lunchtime, he’d left yet another paper rose on your desk, along with a paper crane (the song jay, you assumed).
Your first kiss was somewhat bittersweet.
Some guys who clearly had never heard of Seongje whistled and catcalled you in the street, one evening, and Seongje refused to ignore them. Blood was dripping down his eyebrow and nose, knuckles split, yet he still smiled and laughed as you dragged him away from the alley where the five guys laid groaning.
You made him sit on a bench in a park and bought a first aid kit, which you then used to patch him up. Seongje was still chucking to himself, as if reminiscing the crunch of fist on flesh. He was insane. Utterly insane. Crouching in front of him, you were seething.
“Are you crying?” he suddenly realised. The smile fell.
“Yes,” you grit out.
“… Are you angry with me?”
“Hm-m.”
“Why?”
Why, indeed? Because he’d hurt somebody? No… you knew why.
“Because you’re hurt,” you snapped, “and I care about you. I don’t want you to get hurt, especially not for me.”
His hand held yours, gentle, so gentle. You focused on cleaning the little cut on his lip, refusing to meet his eyes. His searched yours, though, head dipping, until you had no choice but to return his gaze.
One, two, three.
“Are you really crying for me?”
Four, five.
“Yes, of course I am, what do you think? You know I like you.”
His eyes widened.
Six, seven, eight.
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, now, you do. So, please don’t get hurt.”
Nine, ten.
“I like you too. I don’t mind getting hurt for you. I’d hurt anyone for you.”
Such a strange confession. Seongje always said exactly what he meant. You really liked that about him.
You broke eye contact, your eyes falling to his lips. Would it hurt? Would he mind it if it did?
You leaned in, pressed your lips gently to his. His breath stuttered. He stayed entirely still for you, letting you decide. Experiment. Test the feel of lips on lips, the electricity that built. You grew more confident – pressed again and again. He began pressing back, very gently, barely there. Your hand cupped his face, fingers burying in his wild hair. His breath stuttered again. You tasted a little blood and antiseptic on his lips, began drawing back.
He fell off the bench as he chased after your kiss, landing hard on his knees.
You both laughed about it.
“You are my girlfriend, now, right?”
Yes, you were.
You began holding hands whenever you walked together.
Things between you began escalating over the course of the summer term.
Your parents met him. He was very charming when he needed to be, quickly scoring invitations to dinner. He showed you where he lived: a flat somewhere in town, just for him. He opened up a little more: he was the child of a failed marriage. His father had disappeared, and his mother’s new husband had agreed to keep him until he’d been fifteen. Then, he’d been moved to his own flat. Rent was covered, as long as he did not try to return to the family home. His mother never called him. He told you all this, lightly, uncaring, as the two of you were sitting on the floor at the foot of his beat up sofa. Your heart broke for him, and you awkwardly reached for his hand and squeezed it. He hissed – he’d been in another fight, recently.
“Sorry,” you said with contemp. He knew you didn’t like him fighting. “Is there anywhere that doesn’t hurt?”
Jokingly, he pointed at his right ear.
You leaned in – slow, steady. Letting him understand what you were doing. You placed a soft, quiet kiss on the shell of his ear. He turned a delightful shade of crimson. He was nothing if not daring, though, so he pointed to the tip of his nose, and you kissed that too. Then he pointed to his throat. You climbed into his lap for better access, and licked, sucked and bit your way along his collarbone. He was a shaking mess, chest rising and falling quickly, hands flexing at his sides. He was hard, you could feel it under your arse.
You took his hands and placed them on your waist.
“Fuck,” he swore, the hottest thing you had ever heard.
His fingers dug in, palms roaming, cupping you and grinding you against him. You moaned, embarrassingly, and he began nipping at your throat, now.
The first time you had sex for real was in that apartment. It was the first time for you, you didn’t ask if it was for him too, though the way he flushed bright red upon seeing you topless for the first time, and the way he came within a minute of penetration, with the look of a deer caught in headlights, told you all you needed to know.
He was greatly embarrassed by this, despite your reassurances.
“Please give me another chance,” he said, again, the weekend after. “Please, please, please give me another chance…”
“I tell you what,” you said, smiling at him above your boba tea, “if you can me make laugh, right here, right now, I’ll give you another chance tonight.” You raised your eyebrows at him. “Well?”
He opened his mouth, blinking.
“Uh…”
You burst out laughing, forced, hysterical, falling into him and slapping his arm.
“That’s hilarious!” you yelled, his grin widening as he understood the joke. “Let’s go, you win!”
It took a few attempts for you to orgasm – you confessed to him, embarrassed, that you had never even managed to do it by yourself, and he’d got this set look on his face.
“Challenge accepted."
He succeeded. The seventh time you had sex, he succeeded. You lay there, afterwards, sobbing into his chest, overwhelmed, not entirely sure you hadn’t blurted out ‘I love you’ at some point as you’d clawed at his back as he rocked into you relentlessly, having figured out the right angle, pressure and speed, until you came. He kissed your tears, held you tight, said he loved you too.
He grew bolder after that.
Grabbing your face and kissing you, never in a way that would hurt, but definitely in a way that let you feel how much stronger he was. Squishing your face in one hand, turning you to him, your lips forcibly puckered for him to kiss and nip. He liked your hair a lot, held it in his fist, ran both hands over it, buried his face in it. He liked to pin your wrists down during sex – you found that you liked it too. He texted you all the time, grew a little worried and sulky if you didn’t reply quickly.
He continued to ask you to teach him French, though you sometimes had to slap his hand away from your thigh – not in class, you would hiss at him. Everyone knew you were dating.
He liked to fluster you, now that he had figured out how to do that. He’d ask you a question about the French you were teaching him, then rested his arm around the back of your chair, crowding you in, running one hand along your thigh, slipping in, the other hand running through your hair and turning into a fistful.
“Stop it,” you pushed at his chest, blushing furiously. He laughed, leaning back. He had grown entirely too confident for his own good – you kind of missed the shy version of him from early days (though, not really). Still, though. Two could play this game.
One sunny morning you grabbed his notebook and scribbled something quickly, before you had time to talk yourself out of it. You pushed the book back to him.
“Translate that.”
Je te veux dans ma bouche.
He frowned at the page, confused. You turned to the board and focused entirely on the teacher who had just entered the room.
You knew the exact moment he managed to translate the sentence. He near jumped, his knee bumping into his desk. His head whipped round to look at you. You repressed a smile. He cracked his knuckles, ran his hands through his hair, took deep breaths. His ears and neck were red. His leg was bouncing. He was unable to meet your eyes for a while after that, blushing and swearing when you laughed at him, though he entwined his fingers with yours as soon as he was able to.
To your great horror, he tore the little bit of paper you had written on and carried it around in his phone case. Every time his phone was screen down on a table, everyone could read it, not that they understood it. If he caught you looking at it, he made a show of lovingly stroking it. You rolled your eyes.
You were still friends with Juntae, even if you did spend an awful lot of time with Seongje. Juntae liked to hear that you were happy, he even got you a “congratulations on the boyfriend” cake, which was both hilarious and kind of him.
One day after kickboxing, Juntae asked if you wanted to come with him to get some noodles. You said yes.
Juntae guided you through a few streets you didn’t know, in that part of town you never went to apart from the kickboxing.
He chatted nervously on the way, giving off a weird energy which should honestly have rung several alarm bells. You trusted Juntae, though. You trusted him implicitly.
“They do noodles, here?” you asked, peering around at the empty warehouse you’d just walked into.
The door slammed shut behind you.
“I’m really sorry, Rosie,” Juntae said.
“What…?”
Three other boys appeared. A strong, wide boy in a black hoodie. A tall one in a blue hoodie. One your height, in a Eunjang uniform. Your bag was taken from you, your phone placed in someone else's pocket.
“These are my friends,” Juntae explained from behind you, still blocking the door. “Baku, Gotak-ah and Sieun. Don't be scared. We… we want to talk to you.”
You went home in a daze.
Juntae walked a little distance behind, clearly knowing better than to try and talk to you again.
In the safety of your own room you were able to make sense of what had happened. You suspected there had been a vague intention to be intimidating, but that these guys were all good guys, and so they’d quickly resorted to simply explaining their situation to you and begging you to do the right thing.
Seongje, as you already knew, was a complete thug. He ran a group of delinquents from different local schools, challenged anyone to a fight. Here, you were shown pictures of various beat up boys, and were given a breakdown of their injuries and what crime had prompted such an onslaught of violence (most of them had simply looked at Seongje too long; how to reconcile this with the boy who begged you to look at him as he made love to you?). The violence was one thing, but Seongje, you were told, was being groomed to become the leader of something even more sinister: a criminal group run by local gangsters. Real, grown up crimes: money laundering, thieving, corruption, murder.
They knew you were Seongje’s girlfriend, they knew he was reputed to only listen to you. They wanted you to speak to him, tell him to back off of Eunjang, stay away from the Union, or better yet, take what he knew about the Union to the police.
It was implied that you could use whatever means of persuasion needed, be that seduction or emotional blackmail.
They stressed that you were the only one who had any real chance of making Seongje change his ways.
You had asked, your pride in tatters, whether this whole thing was the only reason why Juntae had sought friendship with you in the first place. To, what? Get intel? Manipulate you into dating Seongje, then staging this… intervention? Juntae’s blush and avoidant eye contact had confirmed it all for you. You were blindsided – never in a million year would you have guessed he could be like this. The quieter boy, Sieun, had gruffly admitted that he’d personally always thought it would have been better to simply talk to you from the start.
“But then they weren’t together,” the one called Gotak said, “she had less power.”
Sat on the floor with your back against your bed, you closed your eyes, your wet hair pooling over your shoulders. Your phone kept buzzing; you hadn’t texted Seongje after kickboxing, he must have been getting worried.
You found, heartbreakingly, that you understood Juntae. He was not a bad person. He was a good person in an impossible situation. Gotak, who may not have been his boyfriend, actually, had been beaten several times by Seongje. You had seen a great many pictures. Juntae had shared with you his own experience of Union. The one called Baku had shown you a picture of his childhood best friend, Na Baekjin, who had recently died under strange circumstances. He had been the leader of Union.
You felt like you were a bad person – you were the one who was in love with a monster like Seongje. Juntae hadn't forced anything, he'd simply listened to you, and let you fall.
You knew you had power. You knew you could do the right thing. You knew what the right thing was.
Seongje met you at the park, like you asked, and you could tell he knew something was up. He was waiting for you, standing, his thumb rubbing absentmindedly over that stupid little bit of paper you’d written something so stupid on, weeks ago.
He looked up at you when you arrived.
He was nervous, you could tell, and worried. His pose was defensive, though his eyes were begging. He was so into you it was ridiculous. Perhaps he thought you wanted to break up. It would be easy, you realised, to manipulate him into doing exactly what you wanted. You had seen this boy naked, in more ways than one. You knew exactly where his weaknesses lay.
Your eyes filled with tears.
“Sit with me.”
You guided him to the bench where you had shared your first kiss.
You started from the beginning.
You told him how you had followed your friend after kickboxing and found yourself surrounded by three other boys. You felt him tense, next to you, so you placed a hand on his arm to ground him. You told him that you knew about everything he was doing, and about Union. You said you knew the previous leader of Union had been killed. You said you did not want him to be a part of that. You asked him to back away.
He considered this, silent, staring at the ground.
“Will you leave me if I stay with the Union?”
This was it – you just had to say yes. You knew he would do it. You did not doubt his devotion, not when faced with the possibility of losing you. An ultimatum was all it would take to end this.
You knew, also, that you could never do that to him. You did not want to do that to him, even if it made you a bad person.
“I love you,” you said, voice shaky. “I’ll stay with you no matter what. Union, no Union, prison, whatever. I’m not going to leave you. But… I’d really like it if you didn’t become a gangster.” You broke into a sob. “It’s ok if you fight, as long as the other guy wants to fight, and you don’t kill him, I won’t ask you to stop… just, I would really rather you didn’t get involved with… with murder, and money laundering, and all that kind of stuff. You know?” You were fully crying, now, and he placed an arm around your shoulder, pulling you into his side. You went gratefully, cuddling into him. “I just don’t want you to get killed, you know? Money is nothing. It’s not worth going after innocent people.” You hiccupped. His top was getting wet from your tears and snot. He didn’t seem to care. “But I’ll stay with you no matter what. You won’t lose me.”
You cried, he continued to hold you tight.
“Ok,” he said, softly. “Ok.” He pulled you tighter into himself, turned so he could wrap both arms around you. “Thank you for telling me. Lucky fucker, aren’t I? Thank you for not making me choose.”
You closed your eyes, breathed him in. His thumb was running gently along your jaw, your lips. So, this was it. He was going to remain in the Union. Would you become a gangster wife, or something? Is that what you had kind of been all this time?
Seongje sighed heavily.
“Guess I’m really going to have to look at college,” he lamented. “If I’m to make an honest living. Aish, damn. I really fucking hate school.”
You froze. His eyes were calm and gentle as you stared up at him through your tears.
“You mean…?”
“It wasn’t that fun, anyway,” Seongje shrugged, “it’s way more fun being a good boyfriend.”
You couldn’t help it – you laughed.
“There you go,” his thumb ran along the apple of your cheek, “much better.”
You hugged him again, too tight on his sore ribs, but he hugged you right back.
He asked what else was wrong when you couldn’t stop crying, so you made him take you home and lay in bed with you then told him how Juntae had never really been your friend, just wanted to get close to you because you were close to Seongje, and you told him how scared you’d been to realise you were alone with four boys. He tried to take you home so he could, you knew it, go and find the boys himself, but you stopped him and insisted he left them alone. You had made your peace with it, you understood Juntae and his friends. If this whole thing had meant that you were now with Seongje and Seongje was out of harm’s way, then you were glad for it.
He nodded, tucked you into the crook of his shoulder again. You thought he might have been crying a little, too.
True to his word, Seongje left the Union.
You rekindled your friendship with Juntae, got to meet the other boys properly. Discovered there was nothing intimidating about them.
You both graduated with respectable grades. You decided to go to culinary school, and Seongje, catching you completely off guard, became a maths teacher. He chose to work at the roughest school he could find, thriving off the adrenaline of confrontation. At the weekend, he did amateur boxing and MMA. He got your scribbled ‘je te veux dans ma bouche’ tattooed over his heart, which was both grotesque and incredibly sweet.
After his military service, he proposed to you, and you accepted.
“Told you it wasn’t bullshit,” Choi Hyoman crept up on Go Hyuntak, Park Humin, Seo Juntae and Yeon Sieun, as the five of them overlooked the first dance at Geum Seongje’s wedding.
“Guess not,” Gotak rolled his eyes, rubbing his thumb over Juntae’s knuckles.
“Who would have thought?” Baku shook his head. “Redeemed by love. Wow.”
You named your first child Bom.
Spring.